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The legacy of Jurassic Park: Realistic dinosaurs and their poop

Jurassic ParkPhoto: Murray Close/Universal

Jay Stone

Published: April 2, 2013 - 8:20 AM

Updated: April 2, 2013 - 12:16 PM

It’s an iconic cinematic moment. Sam Neill, playing paleontologist Allan Grant, looks up with slack-jawed amazement. He nudges his colleague Laura Dern, portraying paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, who is distracted by a leaf of an ancient plant she has discovered. She turns and stares, and her mouth drops open as well.

And there it is: a giant brachiosaurus nibbling leaves from a tree.

It doesn’t look like a model, or a beast manufactured in a computer, or one of those charming, stilted monsters that staggered across movie screens from the time of the original King Kong — who battled a stop-action dinosaur in the 1933 film — to the days when effects legend Ray Harryhausen created “Dynamation” monsters like Mighty Joe Young or the Cyclops that the hero battles in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

It looks like a brachiosaurus, just as the Tyrannosaurus Rex that destroys a Ford Explorer, and the velociraptors that chase children through an abandoned building are the most persuasively realistic dinosaurs ever seen. When Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park came out in 1993, it changed the way we saw the prehistoric world, and the way movies could be made.

“There is no week, really, that goes by where someone doesn’t come up to me to bring up Jurassic Park,” Dern says today.

“Adults usually talk to me about the moment where Sam Neill turns my head and my mouth drops open and we reveal the vista with the brachiosaurus and we walk amongst the dinosaurs for the first time. That’s what most movie-lovers talk to me about.”

And lest we forget that Jurassic Park is children’s entertainment as well, she adds that the scene where her character is trying to discover what is hurting an ailing triceratops is also a popular topic of conversation.

‘Most children usually start with me putting my hands in dinosaur poop.’

“Most children usually start with me putting my hands in dinosaur poop. That’s a big conversation I’ve had many a time for more than 20 years.”

It was realistic-looking dinosaur poop, but it is the creatures that have become the defining legacy of Jurassic Park. “It was like one of those moments in history, like the invention of the light bulb or the first telephone call,” said George Lucas, who cried during a test screening that showcased the dinosaur effects.

“A major gap had been crossed, and things were never going to be the same.”

Film historian Tom Shone said: “In its way Jurassic Park heralded a revolution in movies as profound as the coming of sound in 1927.”

Jurassic Park, which is being re-released on Friday in 3D, was a landmark in effects. In the 20 years since its release, Peter Jackson created the world of Lord of the Rings (which had similarly realistic beasts) and a remake of King Kong, and the Japanese monster Godzilla visited American shores as a much more believable — though far less engaging — beast from the deep. Stanley Kubrick, seeing what was possible, went ahead with his film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, with Spielberg directing.

The Jurassic effect spread further as well. Stan Winston, one of the creators of the animatronic dinosaurs, joined with James Cameron to form Digital Domain, an effects company that created realistic worlds in such films as Titanic, Apollo 13, Armageddon, Transformers, and more.

The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were created with puppetry, “Go Motion” — a new form of stop-action animation — animatronics and computers. Dinosaur robots were created with latex skins. Effects were combined to replicate the movements of real creatures: when the Go Motion animation didn’t satisfy Spielberg, he went with computer-generated imagery developed by Industrial Light & Magic, which was working on Cameron’s Terminator 2 at the time.

Laura Dern

“Usually you do a film and there are some effects they put in later, and you rarely meet the artists who are involved,” Dern says. But making Jurassic Park, she recalls sitting with Stan Winston and IL&M’s Dennis Muren, “and we were all together, figuring out the scene together, and where we should look and how we should interact with what wasn’t there but they had in their minds … It really was an unbelievable collaboration and ensemble of people working together to make something come alive.”

They are not only technical marvels, they were melded seamlessly into the story — indeed, the creatures are the protagonists of the film — and given personalities. The T. Rex “acted its ass off,” Winston said.

It was primed to do so. Dern, speaking by phone from her home in Los Angeles, says the special effects artists made creatures — particularly the ailing triceratops — with which she could act out realistic scenes. Puppeteers worked on its eyes, its eyelids, and its tongue. Even its sides went in and out to give it the look of an ailing animal.

“It was very moving in terms of acting, to play the scene as if it were a grandparent or a favourite dog in your life,” Dern says. “There was nothing unreal about it. It was very much like doing a scene with another actor. And the way they would utilize the eyes, the pores, the nostrils. You cannot believe how much humanity suddenly took over in the face.”

Dern was cast after Spielberg saw her Oscar-nominated performance in the 1991 film Rambling Rose. Jurassic Park was a big-budget departure, and Spielberg warned her that it would be unlike any film she had ever done before, or would ever do again. He also told her, “These guys’ll be far more temperamental than any actor you’ll ever work with again,” to which she now says, “I don’t know if that’s quite true.”

The daughter of actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Dern says she knew from a young age that a performer’s work depends largely on the filmmaker who directs it. “So if Steven Spielberg calls me and asks me to do a movie with him, I’m not going to say no.”

She was also influenced by Nicolas Cage, with whom she co-starred in Wild At Heart (1990). “Nic called and asked, ‘Steven Spielberg called you? What did he want you to do?’ I said, ‘He wants me to do a movie about dinosaurs.’ He was like, ‘Oh my God, you have to do a movie about dinosaurs.’ And I heard this obsessed little boy with dinosaurs in the conversation, which was not my orientation as a kid. He was like, ‘Your co-stars are dinosaurs? I’m so jealous.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I guess I have to do the movie.’ ”

Dern knew how much dinosaurs mean to children — especially to boys — but now that she has her own family, she says she sees it even more intensely. She took her son Ellery, 11, and some of his friends to see the 3D version, and she says they loved it (she says her daughter Jaya, who’s almost eight, isn’t quite ready for the movie. “When it’s your mom in peril, that sets up a whole different dynamic.”)

And with the benefit of 20 years hindsight, she says she can appreciate the film as an audience member rather than one of its stars. “As a movie-lover, I was sitting there going, ‘this is such a good movie.’ It’s just a great movie.”